HOW THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS EXPLAINED THE GREAT WAR TO THEIR PUPILS WHILE IT WAS RAGING – by Donal Kennedy

In the 1980s I wrote in THE IRISH DEMOCRAT  a piece called “SCHOOLS OF VIOLENCE: BROTHERS AND ARMS” refuting the canard that the Irish Christian Brothers promoted republican militancy.

Those who spread that canard were quacks, chancers and charlatans.

You may read my refutation which was reprinted as a BLOG here on November 25th 2021.

I did not know at the time that the Brothers produced a monthly commentary of the conflict from start to finish, which eschewed inflammatory propaganda of any sort, written by an anonymous scholar steeped in ancient and modern history and literature, and alive to the ironies

To my mind the very sobriety of the comment  adds to the horror of the conflict.

For example: “The western war front extends almost 700 miles, 17 manned by the Belgians, 31 by the British, 543 by the French. The official report of of a British advance at Neuve Chapelle on March 10 (1915) announced as ‘the finest thing we have achieved in the offensive field’, covers an advance of 1,200 yards on a front of 400 yards.

This ballyhooed victory cost the British the lives of 2,500 men, injury to 8,500 others,, and 1,700 missing. Twelve thousand men squandered as if they were nothing, by stupid generals, who were happy to have multiples of that number wasted for a following three years.

I have alluded to the fact that in the 1950s Conor Cruise O’Brien and myself were fellow travellers on the Hill of Howth Tram. I never heard him speak nor knew who he was, though he sat less than two feet away from me across the aisle. There were school children and students from various institutions including two Christian Brothers Schools.

In 1994 Professor Roy Foster praised the following comment from the Cruiser –

“For a significant minority of Irishmen, the Manichean picture offered by the Christian Brothers…of wicked Protestant Englishmen oppressing virtuous Catholic Ireland, had an enduring appeal. But for most Irish Catholics , at the beginning of the second decade of our century, it clearly didn’t fit the modern realities they knew.”

The Cruiser knew sweet fanny adams about the Christian Brothers, and Foster has shown, for instance in his attack on the film “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” that he knows next to nothing on the second or the beginning of the 3rd Decade of the 20th century.

There have been virtually no periodicals published for young people in Ireland for the past 130 years. My father, born in 1899, read the Edwardian Comics -the Gem and the Magnet. My generation had the Beano, the Dandy, the Wizard and the Rover and The Hotspur and a few American comics.There were no Irish films, and Radio Eireann usually came on the air at 5 PM.

Under Conor Cruise O’Brien RTE served British not Irish interests. THE IRISH TIMES is run by a secretive Trust, set up by Harold Wilson’s crooked “Fixer” Lord Goodman, following a scheme 

inspired by Sir Andrew Gilchhrist, a British Ambassador in Dublin, who had been the Grisly Eminence who had orchestrated a genocidal coup in Indonesia which transferred the limitless riches of that archipelago to western corporation.

In 1914 the Christian Brothers first published the monthly Our Boys whose heroes and villains and other  characters were Irish and 45 years later when I left school it was virtually alone.

In September 1914 the Brothers started the monthly commentary on the Great War.

The commentary was discovered by Brendan Clifford of Athol Books, who knew little about the Christian Brothers having been educated in a rural part of Munster where there were no Christian Brothers, and assumed, wrongly, that they were priests.

Brendan collected all the war commentary which was published as THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS’ HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR in 2007.

As virtually all the wars, insurrections, and other mayhem plaguing our species today have their origin in the Great War, that History is a key to their understanding.